Small-town ways fight modernization

Alpine area's cheese makers battle global production

Posted: Wednesday, October 11, 2000

JEFFREY ULBRICHThe Associated Press

ST. SORLIN D'ARVES, France - For the few dozen dairy farmers clinging to these pristine Alpine slopes, globalization is just a word. Life on much of the rest of the planet is becoming homogenized, but here they don't even pasteurize.

The European Union is sticking its nose into every corner of the continent, regulating this and harmonizing that. It might mean better health standards and subsidies vital to keeping small farms afloat. But many Europeans think the process is turning a rich heritage of regional food into numbing banality.

Down on the flatlands, amber waves of French grain stretch to the horizon. There, bigger still might be better, and uniformity "a la McDonald's" is one key to success in a shrinking world.

Not here. In St. Sorlin, a wheel of Beaufort is still made the way it always was - from unpasteurized milk drawn just hours earlier from a native Tarentaise cow that spends her life munching the sweet mountain grass above the village.

Rennet from a calf's stomach is added to curdle the milk, which is scalded and stirred before it is placed in a linen cloth and squeezed in a wooden hoop.

Fabrication only takes three hours, but aging in a cool, dark warehouse takes six to 12 months. The farmers who own the Cheese Cooperative of the Arves Valley produce only a dozen or so 90- to 100-pound wheels of Beaufort a day, fewer than 5,000 a year.

Such traditions could clash with a proposal by European governments to create hygiene standards for all categories of food produced in Europe, including unpasteurized cheese. Farmers also are concerned the standard setters in Brussels might erase production quotas that prop up dairy prices.

"Forty families are living off this," said Daniel Roux, an agricultural counselor in the regional development office, pointing to the steep slopes dotted here and there with brown cows.

Each farmer puts his 15,300-gallon milk quota to maximum benefit by contributing the milk to a "value-added" product - Beaufort cheese - to earn greater profits.

Eight other cooperatives in the region also produce what many think is the world's best Gruyere-style cheese. While most Beaufort is consumed in France, it is exported to Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - as well as minuscule amounts to the United States, Japan, Australia and South Africa.

How the hygiene rules will affect the Beaufort cooperatives is unclear. Some producers of traditional foods, particularly in Italy, have gone so far as to declare their products a national cultural heritage to escape the heavy European hand.

They might be overreacting. The 178-page hygiene proposal urges "a certain flexibility" in dealing with small businesses, particularly in remote locations such as mountains, and makers of traditional products.

On the other hand, farmers wonder how long it will be before Brussels looks more closely at the Beaufort production methods, its wooden molds and linen cloths.

Milk, Roux acknowledges, is full of bacteria. Most of them are good and make Beaufort cheese the sublime treat it is. A few are bad - particularly listeria monocytogenes and staphylococcus. Regular rigorous checks are made at all levels of production, he said.

Outbreaks of listeria this year killed seven people in France. Though the culprit was found to be pork tongue, it put food hygiene on the front pages. Roux and others insist that when listeria is found in cheese, it is invariably discovered in mass-produced cheeses, not the artisan variety.

Sixteen years ago, when the European Union introduced production quotas, French farmers cried foul. The supranational quasi-government in Brussels was taking money out of their pockets.

Today, dairy farmer Jean-Marc Guigue, a cheese cooperative member, praises quotas. Without them, "there would be no milk producers left" in tough mountain areas like this in the heart of France's Savoy region. Left to their own devices, farmers overproduce and drive down prices. Now, besides worrying about health regulations, farmers fear the "Eurocrats" in Brussels are getting too liberal-minded and will free the market.

"The abolition of the milk quota would be catastrophic, not just for us, but for all of Europe's milk producers," Guigue said. "They have to find a compromise between over-administration and total liberalism."

Guigue and his cousin jointly farm 220 acres on the gentler slopes near Mognard on Lake Bourget, about 60 miles north of here. In 1955, there were 40 dairy farmers in the village of 300 inhabitants. Today, there are three. At age 40, Guigue is the youngest.

Tightly controlled milk prices and generous subsidies mean he and his cousin earn a living. Between the European Union and the French government, Guigue receives a $6,600 subsidy for farming in a mountain zone, $6,000 for the 50 acres of grain grown for feed, and $2,600 as a pasturage subsidy.

The subsidies let the farmers survive. When winter comes to St. Sorlin, at 5,000 feet, the cows are brought in from pasture and farmers turn to second jobs on ski slopes. Most of these villages have small ski resorts to supplement farm incomes.

European Union regulations geared to the mass producer could upset that balance. The quality and distinctiveness of the Beaufort cheese justifies its high price and provides livable income.

"If you standardize everything, the product becomes banal," Roux said. "Everything will become the same."